Innholdsfortegnelse for April 8-21, 2024 i New York Magazine

1 Kerry Howley investigated the “private and public seductions” of podcaster Andrew Huberman, a prominent pop neuroscientist, for New York’s latest cover story (“Mechanisms of Control,” March 25-April 7). Researcher Cécile Simmons called it a “remarkable piece of reporting,” noting, “Biohackers and tech bros’ obsessive self-control is often about controlling others, specifically the women in their lives.” Writer Tom Gara observed, “This article shows Andrew Huberman to be a huge dirtbag and very dishonorable in his treatment of women, although its description of his management of a five-simultaneous-girlfriends situation doesn’t dispel his reputation for extreme productivity/focus.” Reporter Molly Taft liked that “the women wronged by this man have bonded together and maintain a lively and supportive group chat.” “Oh my god, 5 women pulled a straight up John Tucker Must…

IT’S A MONDAY morning in March, and Danny Lavery is up first to quietly bake the bread he proofed the night before and to walk the two little dogs Maxim Casaubon Lavery (goes by Bon Bon) and Huckleberry Rigaud Lavery (prefers Gogo). Danny and the dogs are, for now, alone in the early-to-bed, early-to-rise camp. His wife, Grace Lavery, gets up a little later, and Lily Woodruff is liable to sleep in as well. Lily has a number of projects to attend to, but at the forefront is gestating the household’s baby. Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later…

ON THE DAY THAT Cafe La Fortuna opened on the Upper West Side in 1976, business was slow. “We sold one espresso and made exactly 85 cents,” says Richard Urwand, son of the café’s late owners, Alice and Vincent Urwand. “We thought, What the hell did we just do? But I guess someone liked that one espresso enough to tell someone else, and before we knew it, people started coming in.” Eventually, word spread to the two most famous people in the neighborhood (and arguably the entire world): John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who lived a block away at the Dakota. Cafe La Fortuna, which was best known for its sandwiches and Italian desserts, became the couple’s regular spot. “They used to come in a few times a week, him…

FEW PLACES HAD a shorter, brighter, or more impactful run than One Fifth, which opened in the fall of 1976. The elegant, nautically themed establishment is famous as the place where Keith McNally cut his teeth and where the original Saturday Night Live crew hung out because Lorne Michaels lived nearby. One Fifth quickly became a kind of beacon for downtown art celebrities and young New Yorkers who didn’t quite know they were celebrities yet. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were regulars, and so was a New York Magazine editor named Anna Wintour. “It was a particular mix of people who were just starting to make it,” says Vincent Fremont, who managed Warhol’s Factory in Union Square. “For many of us, it was one of the first places you could…

THE OWNER OF Maxwell’s Plum, Warner LeRoy, the son of Hollywood director Mervyn LeRoy and grandnephew of studio chieftain Jack Warner, had grown up with an appreciation for the magic of celebrity. He kept a list of 450 VIPs, the most important of whom could slide into the tables along the wall in the back room, which was famous for its ceiling covered with glittering Tiffany glass. “You name it—everyone was there. It was the hot restaurant during a time when there were very few inhibitions holding people back,” remembers Drew Nieporent, the future proprietor of Nobu, who found himself running the front of the house at age 23. LeRoy had toyed with a variety of sexually charged names (the Silver Cherry was one) before settling on Maxwell’s Plum, and…

IN 2021, I BOUGHT A PLACE across the street from Lucali. It was, by that point, famous for its delicious pizza and doubly famous for attracting celebrities. It wasn’t long before I became like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, ogling the pizzeria from my living room, watching as a flock of chauffeured SUVs descended upon my otherwise quiet Carroll Gardens street. Beyoncé and Jay-Z were early adopters. I went for the first time in 2008. No sooner had I finished telling my date that it was Bey’s favorite pizza than an Escalade pulled up and she and Jay-Z proceeded to house a pie at the table next to ours. The lines really started getting crazy after Lucali was featured on David Chang’s Ugly Delicious in 2018. Now, every time someone…

BEFORE NOBU and Masa, the city’s sushi world was a smaller, more settled place. “The restaurants were very old-fashioned, they were in midtown, they were marketed mostly to Japanese businessmen, and these guys did not want to see any fucking white people in their restaurants,” recalls Nobu’s Drew Nieporent. Sushiden on East 49th Street was partially owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation; it was a forbidding oasis for salarymen dressed in their dark suits. Kurumazushi, which is still doing business in a small walk-up space on 47th Street, was the big-money venue where the sushi was stored in a golden box and the chef (who called his carefully selected fish “my jewels”) charged upwards of $200 for an omakase dinner when, as one sushi-snob friend remembers, “no one had ever heard…

ESTHER ENG WAS SAID to be the first Chinese woman to direct movies in both the U.S. and China. Eng, who lived openly as a lesbian, dressed in masculine clothing, and went by the nickname Big Brother Ha, grew up in San Francisco, made movies in Hong Kong, and moved to New York by 1950. As the story goes, Eng ran into an old friend, Bo Bo, a Chinese actor who was reluctant to return to China, which was then under Mao. She decided to open a restaurant to give her friend and his troupe work. Called Bo Bo, it was located on Pell Street in the heart of Chinatown. In time, the restaurant became a harbor for expat Chinese actors, a place where they could get help learning English…

MORE HAS BEEN written about Elaine’s than maybe any other restaurant, probably because writers and movie stars adopted it as their hangout. People liked to trash the food, but nobody went to Elaine’s for the meal. You went to Elaine’s for any of three reasons: (1) Elaine liked you and was willing to carry your tab if you were talented and broke; (2) Elaine liked your friends and you were allowed in by proxy; or (3) you wanted to get a glimpse of Norman Mailer, Michael Caine, or Woody Allen. Woe betide you if you were in group No. 3 and intruded on the privacy of group No. 1. Elaine was never shy about chucking people out.…

TO A HEEDLESS VISITOR, every McDonald’s looks about the same. But for as long as the fast-food chain has been in New York (its first store opened here in 1972), certain locations have served different purposes—as a high-low venue for a black-tie benefit gala attended by Andy Warhol in 1976, a quasi rec center for elderly Korean patrons in Flushing in 2014, or simply as hubs for various, and often debaucherous, crews throughout the five boroughs. In the late aughts, at around 2 or 3 a.m., when the Lower East Side nightlife scene known as Hell Square began shutting down, the McDonald’s on Delancey and Essex provided an antidote to closing time: You didn’t have to go home, and you absolutely could stay there. “It was another character in our…

Sammys IN 1988 WE’D GO TO either Pink Tea Cup or Sammy’s on City Island. We ate there every day. They always were able to cater to 20 or more people. Fried clams, lobster with butter, king-crab legs—that was the pig-out place. You’d leave there hurting, mad that you went to eat. We’d always get the same table: in the back, by the water, right before the deck. We were never outside. It was me and my people and Jay and his people. Everybody met at City Island. AS TOLD TO BEN KESSLEN…

WHEN DINER opened in 1998 in a dining car that had been sitting empty just south of the Williamsburg Bridge, it wasn’t entirely clear who its actual diners might be. Shoppers at the nearby thrift store Domsey’s, maybe? Owners Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth hadn’t known that the Gretsch, the battleship-size guitar factory across the street, was full of artists living there illegally. “There weren’t a lot of restaurants,” remembers Casey Spooner, who ate there daily while recording the Fischerspooner album #1. For a very brief bohemian moment, Diner was a world-class distillery of high-proof cool. The fashion editor Cecilia Dean brought Hedi Slimane there in a Town Car looking for “pasty-white lanky rock-and-roll hipsters” to model. In May 2000, a pop-up version, with actual Diner diners flown in to…

IT STARTED with a conversation about the Stanley water bottle. Specifically, my 8-year-old had a friend over who asked me why my daughter doesn’t have one. We’re an Owala household, I explained. “Everyone at school is into those telephone water bottles anyway,” she said. I, of course, had to find out what a “telephone water bottle” was, so I Googled. The water bottle in question looks like an old rotary phone and popped up in multiple listings on Amazon: It holds 13.5 ounces, and the whole top twists off to reveal a straw. It also comes with stickers to decorate it. I asked the girls who at school had gotten it first. “It was T.,” they both said, and she had camera, watermelon, and doughnut versions, too. I texted T.’s…

DAVID KENNEDY CUTLER, East Williamsburg; davidkennedycutler.com OWNER DAVID KENNEDY CUTLER and his employees are all exhibiting artists who hang art as a way to support their own studio work. Art adviser Ivy Shapiro says his team makes even highly complex installations feel relaxed. Recently, she says, the crew had to partially remove a large painting from its stretcher (the wooden framework that a canvas is attached to) so it could fit through a prewar home’s labyrinthine corridors. This process was complicated by the fact that the buyer wanted the piece installed before the oil paint had fully dried, so the painting couldn’t be rolled and restretched once it arrived. Kennedy Cutler handled the situation with aplomb, altering the stretcher so that the painting could drape around it and be…

ON A RAINY early-spring evening, a parade of Barbie dreamgirls and gays make their way to see Nicki Minaj, the sound of high heels crunching on the pavement. It’s the first night of her run of Northeast shows on the Pink Friday 2 World Tour at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. While walking toward the venue, a woman in a layered pink miniskirt, a bikini top, and Lucite coral kitten heels bumps into someone who is demonstrably not a Minaj fan: gray hoodie, jeans, a distinct lack of Big Cunt Energy. The other person doesn’t even notice, but this woman clocks the disrespect. “You ain’t a Barb,” she says mostly to herself as she hobbles along the pavement. “You an ugly bitch.” Taylor Swift has her Swifties, Beyoncé…

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendations, see vulture.com. MUSIC 1. Listen to The Tortured Poets Department It’s me—again—hi. Republic Records, April 19. Since chasing the 2022 release of her tenth album, Midnights, with the Eras tour and film, rerecordings of back-catalogue highlights Speak Now and 1989, and a whirlwind romance with Super Bowl–winning tight end Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift advances a never-ending rollout with album No. 11, which features Post Malone and Florence + the Machine.CRAIG JENKINS TV 2. Watch Fallout Time to venture out of the Vault. Prime Video, April 11. Creative partners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy put on their executive-producer hats for this adaptation of the popular retro-futurist video game, which imagines an alternate Earth transformed by nuclear power and stars Ella Purnell as a woman…

ANYONE WHO remembers Coffee Shop remembers this big outdoor area. That was where the more finicky people sat, the people who wanted to be seen. I remember working brunch one day, and we were so short-staffed I had that whole outdoor area to myself. It was so busy. At one point, I just set my head down on the edge of the service station and almost cried. I told myself, Okay, you need to just put one foot in front of the other and get through this. I think about that all the time. All the time. There are days now where, obviously, what I’m doing is very different, but I go back to that brunch shift. I worked there for five years. It was one of the most formative…

IF 2006 EVER CALLS and wants its celebrities back, the caller ID might well come up as “Da Silvano.” Silvano Marchetto’s Italian restaurant spilled onto an unusually broad sidewalk on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village from 1975 until 2016—often with one of his three Ferraris parked outside. Perhaps its ample outdoor seating—more like the Ivy in L.A. than anything in New York—helped attract the glam clientele for which it was known. The stars provided a buffet for the paparazzi (who were always waiting by the curb) without appearing too thirsty for attention. Celebrities descended upon Da Silvano throughout its 41-year run, but 2006—with its saucer-size sunglasses and brand-new T-Mobile Sidekicks—was the year in which Frank Bruni began his New York Times review (dropping it from two stars to one) by…

JIMMY’S BRONX Cafe basically started New Age Latino cuisine. The spread could be legendary, like 100 lobsters, 100 steaks, paella—their seafood paella was crazy. At Jimmy’s parties, you would have everybody from Eminem to Mary J. Blige to Derek Jeter. In fact, they gave a warning to all the Yankees players because they used to be at Jimmy’s every day. The team told all the players, like, “Yo, you gotta stay out of this joint.” AS TOLD TO BEN KESSLEN…

PINK PONY was a place I used to go every single day because I was friends with Lucien, who also owned Lucien on First and 1st. I grew up with his son, Zac. So I could go there and get free meals and then sneak into Max Fish and just get wasted. I was 15, and I would eat so much. It was like French American fusion: cheeseburgers, steaks, delicious French onion soup, oysters. They had snails, I think. I was such a big pothead during those days. I remember having the craziest munchies and eating everything on the menu because it was free. AS TOLD TO BEN KESSLEN…

JAMES ALSTON IV OPENED HIS homestyle Harlem diner in 1962, and it quickly became a destination for Black politicians, religious leaders, and community organizers. 22 West doubled as a bar, a jazz club, and even a gallery. It never fully embraced the trappings of a social club, but, with its plates of oxtails, smothered chicken, and greens, the restaurant nurtured a sense of community and trust among its diners. Frequent customers included Muhammad Ali; Percy Sutton; labor leader Howard Bennett, who would go on to fight to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday; and, most notably, Malcolm X, who became such a fixture that he used the restaurant’s pay phone to make radio announcements and regularly held court in his own back booth. (And it’s where he…

KNOWN SIMPLY AS WELL’S, it opened in 1938 as a three-booth, five-stool bistro in Central Harlem. It would later become a 250-seat restaurant famous far and wide for its chicken and waffles. Although Smalls Paradise, another Harlem staple, was likely serving its own version over a decade earlier, owner Joseph Turner Wells eventually trademarked a logo, helping to stake the Supper Club’s claim—misattributed—as the dish’s founder. The origins hardly mattered to the Black musicians and performers who headed there after shows at the Cotton Club, which, like many of the spots they performed at, remained segregated, prohibiting them from eating dinner there. Regulars included everyone from Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington to Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra. In a 1984 New York Times article, published two years after Well’s…

WHEN COSITAS RICAS opened in 2000, it became a refuge for Jackson Heights’ Colombian community, a modest bakery where you could nurse a café con leche and a guava pastry for hours. The energy inside skewed campy: Employees dressed in beige-and-green uniforms, and hamburger-shaped neon signs adorned the walls. Customers often stopped by wearing waist-trainers and with their hair in rollers. Then, in 2006, True Colors, a popular gay bar, opened next door. The restaurant quickly became—and remains—a queer haven: To this day, it’s not uncommon to see a table of trans women and gays sharing a bottle of aguardiente sitting next to a group of straight dudes cursing at the soccer games playing on TV monitors overhead, all while waitresses float effortlessly among the aisles calling everyone amor. Over…

PARK AVENUE SOUTH between East 28th and 29th was always lined with cabs; Belmore Cafeteria, named for a brand of cigars, served food to drivers at all hours. The Belmore occupied a culinary niche that’s now gone, that of steam-table corned-beef hash and boiled potatoes, borscht and roasted squash, served on fiberglass trays. The hamburger was reportedly pretty good, and there were pitchers of water in case a customer needed to run outside and top up his radiator. Taxi Driver made it famous—Peter Boyle, as Wizard, lays out his earnest if incoherent philosophy to Travis Bickle there late one night—but times change and cabbies retire. The building came down for a beige apartment tower in 1984. C.B. BY THE EARLY 1990S, South Asian immigrants had taken on the mantle of…

➸ AN AGILE hand vac can make cleaning feel like a satisfying pleasure. Writer Amelia Mularz tested dozens of options to find the five most capable spot cleaners, and Shark’s Wandvac Cordless Handheld Vacuum ($130) handily won in the “affordable but not deeply hideous” category. The Wandvac holds its charge for 17 minutes (long enough to clean up all the crumbs Mularz’s toddler scatters over the course of a day), has impressive suction, and, at just under a pound and a half, is the lightest of our selections. It’s also remarkably attractive; the charging dock is so sleek that Mularz is happy to leave it out on her kitchen counter. We named Dyson’s Humdinger ($300) our best overall hand vac because of its 25-minute run time and motorized attachment for…

Boots Delphine Anton, maître d’ at Ilis in Greenpoint, loves these square-toed heeled booties. She has been wearing her current pair for over a year and says they’re “very chic but extremely comfortable, even on eight-plus-hour days.” Oxfords After an extensive hunt, Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, owner of Cecchi’s, landed on these Cole Haans. They’re a bit dressy, making them ideal for moving from work to nonwork activities, and two pairs later, he cites zero break-in period. Clogs These slip-ons have the perfect amount of arch and lift, says Cerise Zelenetz, owner of Cherry on Top, a natural-wine bar in Bushwick. They also have a padded footbed and “look like clogs and Blundstones had a baby,” she adds. Sneakers Toussaint Stackhouse, wine director at Heaven and Earth, a wine bar in Greenpoint,…

IN A SINGLE morning commute a few weeks ago, I spotted over 100 tote bags, and many were enviable, including a Longchamp Le Pliage tote, several Baggu Nylon Shoulder Bags, a striped Isabel Marant tote, and leather bags from Coach, J.Crew, and Madewell. But of all the ones I saw, the Cuyana stood out. I talked to multiple people with this bag, including Liz Goldberg, who works at the Met. She told me it’s lightweight but holds its shape, is made from the softest leather, and still feels balanced even when it’s packed. I ventured to Cuyana’s Soho store and bought the brand’s Zipper Tote. So far, it sits comfortably on my shoulder, even while carrying my thousand-page law-school textbooks.…

DONNA SOLOWAY Board member and writer, Midtown East What brings you here? I’m a Francophile. I’m a fluent French speaker, I read in French constantly, and I read about this event on the website French Morning. I thought, How big could it be? Maybe three, four manufacturers? Well, there were like more than 30 baguette-makers here, and I was surprised because a lot of them were very good. Do you like living in Midtown East? It’s not the Upper East Side. Upper East Side girls are different. Midtown girls go to all the places—we go north, south, west. Upper East Side girls don’t go out of their way. And actually, we live in Truman Capote’s old building. We have two towers, and Truman lived in mine. By the way, I…

FOR 40 YEARS, I was an editor, mostly of magazines, including this one. As an editor and as a reader, I found the story of how creators create irresistible. I liked that these stories had a classic structure to them—each inherently dramatic, starting with nothing and ending with something. I assigned a story on Stephen Sondheim in which he explained how he wrote a single song. I traced the evolutions of buildings and novels and soap-opera arcs. Cultural procedurals were especially good material. ¶ When I quit my magazine job, I decided to try my hand as an artist. It wasn’t entirely abrupt: In my work, I always found it satisfying telling stories in photographs and graphics and drawings, and in spare moments—a whim at first—I picked up a paintbrush…

IF “THE FUTURE’S already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed” (see William Gibson), in the Brooklyn I knew growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, the past was strewn around in randomized chunks, like the clamshells in a giant bowl of Two Toms’ linguine. The little spot at Third and Union wasn’t a nostalgic portal into a romanticized Ye Olde Brooklyn (like, say, Gage & Tollner); it was simply stuck in time, like a piece of overcooked pork chop you can’t work out of your back molars until you get busy with a toothpick. Never sublime enough to become any foodie’s fetish, it was a workingman’s red-sauce house to the end, famous for the cops and firefighters, yes, but also home to tradespeople. The restaurant’s fake-stone stucco and tin awning…

FOR THE JAZZ MUSICIANS of the 1960s, Birdland was the club to play on 52nd Street—then still Swing Street, filled with nightclubs, though not for much longer—and Ham N’ Egg Corner was the place to eat. Partly, this had to do with practicality (it was across the street) and accessibility (it was open 24 hours), but it was also, as pianist Kenny Barron puts it, “a great vibe.” The peak hour always came around 3 a.m., as the night’s sets wrapped up. “You’d be there for hours,” says Barron, waiting for other band members to trickle in. Once, he remembers, he saw bassist Wilbur Ware looking in through a frosty glass window, smiling at the musicians with their instruments propped up against the linoleum tables. An assortment of performers, fans,…

FOR A CERTAIN SET of private-school kids who came of age in the mid-’90s, the Serafina on 79th and Madison will always be Sofia. The restaurant opened in 1995, the same year I started high school, and quickly became our social hub. My friends and I would come for dinner, marching up the narrow steps in bulbous Steve Maddens, carrying box-cut Kate Spades, with Ricky’s glitter on our eyelids. The hostess would herd us past the main dining room (where grownups sat), up another flight to the third story, which had tented ceilings and uneven brick floors. This was the domain of teenagers. “It was the one place you’d see everyone from all the schools,” says Elana Wexler, a friend from school days. We all showed up: Riverdale, Trinity, Spence,…

THERE’S A CERTAIN kind of restaurant that feels fancy when you’re young and broke and brand new to the city, as I was in 1999, the year Lavagna opened on East 5th Street just west of Avenue B. By the time I started hanging out there in the mid-aughts, the rustic Italian joint was part clubhouse, part grown-up restaurant that adults hadn’t spoiled: It was ours. The Strokes were and remain the most enduring regulars. “Brett first brought them,” recalls the restaurant’s owner, Yorgos Hatziefthimiou, referring to Brett Kilroe, the art director at the Strokes’ label, RCA, who designed the cover of their 2001 debut album, Is This It. “The Strokes started bringing their families, their girlfriends, and the other girlfriends, and their friends,” Hatziefthimiou says. “They were part of…

ACCORDING TO ITS SLOGAN, Dubrow’s was the “Cafeteria of Refinement”—never mind that the BMT subway ran almost directly over its roof. The chainlet (established in 1929, dismantled in 1985) operated in several locations, but the one that lingers in the mind was at Kings Highway and East 16th Street. There, surrounded by showy Italianish murals and an elaborate tile water fountain, three generations of Flatbush residents ate well for not much. The food was comparable to what they’d get at an Automat or a coffee shop but with a slightly Jewish accent: coffee cake, blintzes, chopped liver. Dubrow’s was open 24 hours, arguably busiest on weekends after services let out at Temple Ahavath Sholom. That made it a useful place to mingle with—and court—voters. John F. Kennedy, campaigning on a…

“IF YOU KNOW where the lesbians are, please take me,” Edie Windsor asked a friend in the early ’60s. Divorced for a decade, Windsor was unsure where to meet other women without risking her career at IBM. She ended up at Portofino Restaurant on Thompson and Bleecker, where she met Thea Spyer. Portofino was a straight restaurant that cultivated a discreet but dedicated lesbian following. Passing in whispers between friends, word spread: The food was delicious, the crowd was artistic, and on Friday nights, the women were almost certainly gay. In the early days, Portofino was managed by Elaine Kaufman, who was honing her knack for drawing writers, artists, and musicians. “It was a wild and fun and very scary time because you never knew when the place was going…

IT SEEMED LIKE all of Def Jam used to go to Time Cafe. The female record executives, especially—Rhonda Cowan, Tracey Waples—used to hang out there. We were having so much fun. And that food was good. The angel-hair pasta—oh my God, it was just incredible. One time, I was gonna have a meeting with Andre Harrell, God rest his soul, the former head of Uptown Records and Motown. I told my relative to meet me before so I’m not sitting by myself. She sat down and started to steal the silverware. I was like, “Oh my God, put it back.” Andre and Russell Simmons came walking in, she got up, and the silverware fell everywhere—clink, clink, clink. I turned bright red. When the waitress came over, she just picked up…

WHEN I WAS 8 YEARS OLD, I wrote a note saying I was going to have my own restaurant by the time I was 30. But as that birthday approached, I was looking and looking for a space and everything was too expensive. My best friend, Yvonne Force Villareal, said Chelsea was going to be the next big place, but I wasn’t totally convinced. I wasn’t looking to be cool. I was looking to be successful. Our first night, Lot 61 had 500 people from all over. The only celebrity I ever knew, an old pal, a bestie, was Bruce Willis. He was really so instrumental in sending so many people. When Kevin Costner was in town for three months, he came in because Bruce Willis told him to. It…

THE WRITERS AND ARTISTS who loitered around Macdougal Street in the 1950s have been called a lot of things: “irresponsible tea heads,” Allen Ginsberg used to say; “subterraneans,” Jack Kerouac called them; and “real bastards,” according to the artist Mary Frank. To most people, though, they are and will forever be the Beats—a group united not so much by artistic style as by proximity and a desire to drink, do drugs, screw around, write, and repeat. Where, then, did food fit into the equation? Mostly, it didn’t. To them, it was just “something they put in their mouth,” says Frank, who was married to the photographer Robert Frank, himself a part of the Beat crowd, for 19 years. The restaurants, cafés, and bars they frequented throughout their 20s served more…

TUCKED ON THE QUIET CORNER of Commerce and Barrow Streets in the West Village, across from two identical townhouses separated by a shared gated garden (fancifully rumored to have been built for warring twin sisters) and a few doors down from the Cherry Lane Theatre, was Grange Hall. I was hired as a waiter before it opened in 1992, which, at the time, was something of a surprise. Typically, restaurants had a stunning Black woman at the host stand, eye candy for the white male patrons, but Black men were mostly relegated to being busboys or barbacks, even in bohemian downtown. Luckily, one of Grange’s owners, Jacqui Smith, took a shine to me. Grange served comfort food in a Great Depression–speakeasy type setting—down to the portrait of FDR over the…

RIGHT OUT of the gate, Indochine was one of the hottest spots in the city—alongside Area and Danceteria. But while those places were wild and messy, Indochine, which served Vietnamese food from its perch on Lafayette Street, was chic. The opening-night crowd in 1984 included Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. Debi Mazar visited throughout the ’80s, sometimes with Madonna in tow. “I loved walking up those stairs with the red light,” Mazar recalls. “And then there’s some gorgeous model going, ‘Hello, let me take you to your seat.’ And me just going, Why can’t I look like her? Why is she a waitress?” (The staff has long been intimidatingly gorgeous. “Whoever did the hiring must’ve been a casting director,” Bethann Hardison told me.) You could see U2 sitting…

CELEBRITY SHOPPING Tumi Alpha Bravo Search Backpack, from $595 “It fits my laptop, my workout gear, a change of clothes, my knives. I’ve had it for three years now, and it’s been super-durable. People always compliment me on it or are like, ‘Yo, I got that same bag.’” 111Skin Rose Gold Illuminating Eye Mask, $110 for eight “These eye masks are incredible, especially if I’m shooting. I’m so shameless with them. I was just doing a Clint Eastwood movie in Savannah, and I would throw them on, jump in my rental car, and go to the coffee shop. These are not cheap, but they do work.” Teva ReEmber Quilted Bootie, $80 “If I wear sweats at home, it reminds me of being sick. And I feel the same way about…

Because I personally do not need any more broken crayons lying around the house, I opted for these neon half-pencils last year. I was imagining kids drawing quietly or pretending they were detectives jotting down clues. A friend bought these hardcover sketchbooks for her daughter’s art-themed birthday party, where the kids would be creating their own books. The cover is great for drawing on. For a smaller party, consider these felt bananas that Strategist senior writer Liza Corsillo recently gave out at her son’s 1st-birthday party. My kids, who attended, were happy to receive them—especially because the banana comes out of its peel. When my younger son turned 1 last year, I got a bunch of these mini tiger puzzles from Mudpuppy to go with the party’s tiger theme—the Chinese-zodiac…

For Immaculate Gallery Walls ILEVEL, 37 E. 7th St.; 212-477-4319; ilevel.biz WHEN YOU’RE PUTTING up a gallery wall, one errant nail can ruin the entire thing. For more than 30 years, David Kassel has been sparing New Yorkers from this agonizing mistake. Kassel worked as an installer to help pay his way through art school, then joined the Guggenheim’s installation crew while earning his B.F.A. These days, he’s popular with high-end interior designers, including Alexandra Pappas, Richard Mishaan, and Young Huh. His company, ILevel, focuses solely on art arrangement and installation—no transport and no storage—and hangs about 56,000 paintings, prints, photographs, mirrors, sconces, and family-photo collections each year. “I have a pretty strong sense of how I’d like things installed, but they are really great to collaborate with,” says interior…

THERE COMES A TIME when a New Yorker must pledge allegiance to his or her preferred Korean fried-chicken outpost: Are you a Mad for Chicken man? Pelicana partisan? Or one of the many who still lament the gone-but-not-forgotten charms of Baden Baden? Simon Kim, who Koreanized the New York steakhouse with Cote (or steakified the KBBQ, depending on your perspective), is hoping a quorum of the wealthy will warm to Coqodaq, his own entrant in the ongoing KFC wars. So far, they have. Since it opened in January, Coqodaq (the French and Korean words for “chicken,” soldered together) has been taunting aspirant diners with nothing more than midnight Resy slots and unfulfilled promises to Notify them. Coqodaq has the low lights, pulsing music, and door-stationed bouncer of a nightclub, and…

You Must Remember This, Independent Karina Longworth, Hollywood’s preeminent fame scholar, reappraises film history. I Was There Too, Independent Matt Gourley, one of comedy podcasting’s original producers, spotlights tiny roles in big films and television shows. Song Exploder, Independent Over 250 episodes and a Netflix adaptation later, Hrishikesh Hirway breaks ground by breaking down tunes with their musicians. Criminal, Vox Media (our parent company) Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer continue to redefine and elevate the crime story. Serial, New York Times After transforming the pod world forever, Sarah Koenig & Co. are still asking, ‘What’s up with America?’…